If any degree of sanity is required in an encounter,by nature, it must be delegated to a NPC. Because the players will be too busy trying to steal everything that isn't nailed down, and lighting what is nailed down on fire.

And once the nails have melted, steal THAT too.
Then steal the fire.
Then the walls.
Then the building's foundation.
And then sneak into the town hall archives and steal any evidence that the building ever even existed in the first place.

Shadowrun 4e
The team was hired to break into a non-profit hospital and steal some records on a couple of possibly dangerous patients. The night the PCs pick to break in is the night another team was going in to break out the two dangeous patients. Turns out the two in question are on the FBI top 10 most wanted and the hospital didn't know it.

The "enemy" team comes roaring down the street in an armored truck and the PCs need a distraction. They ask their NPC sniper to be that distraction. Their sniper is a female elf who's all about taking risks for the adrenaline.

So here cones that armored truck and the NPC is standing in the middle of the road with her sniper rifle. Note that what comes next is not scripted. This was the result of random die rolls:
1 - NPC sniper wins initiative, headshot the driver of the armored truck. Dead.
2 - truck veers and misses the NPC sniper by inches. Hits a parked car on the street and flips sideways.
3 - Enemy team (3 remaining members)climbs out of the truck, two open fire at sniper, no hits.
4 - NPC sniper head shots enemy 2 and 3. Dead. Dead.
5 - Remaining enemy gets cover and opens fire. Hits sniper. Sniper down.
6 - Enemy walks up to sniper, checks for pulse.
7 - NPC sniper (faking being unconscious) fastdraws a pistol at the enemy. Head shot. Dead.
8 - PC team proceeds to double sniper's salary for this mission.

(D&D 3.5) In our present party of 3, the group's fighter serves more of an "Iron Curtain" role. He doesn't do much in the way of damage. Our other party members are a Bard and a Druid. Now, we tend to focus on high-immersion roleplay, but combat DOEs happen, and this group isn't well set for much more than attrition.

In the last session, the party was preparing to lay waste to a complex of insect-templated ogres and their pet umber hulks, lead by an advanced Ogre Mage leader. The intention was to rescue an immature trumpet archon who had been kidnapped for sacrifice. En Route to the ogres' stronghold, they encountered a dwarven ranger NPC, who I had brought along to serve as the damage dealer for this adventure, lest the party be overwhelmed in this situation. For the first while, we got a lot of very anti-dwarf statements. (A dwarf breathes so loud we could have shot him in the dark!) What the party wasn't fully aware of was the depth of this dwarf's hatred for the ogres. (Favoured enemy Giant, rogue levels, et cetera. He WAS written as an extra for this PARTICULAR adventure, after all.)

The dwarf scouted ahead into the first chamber, informing the party that there were two creatures clinging to the ceiling. The party proceeded forward, and as soon as they entered, the dwarf tumbled in and around a corner. A moment later, the knight took his defensive stance as the two hulking creatures dropped down before them. As their claws touched the ground, there was a sharp "Chack-chack-chack!" and the first ogre fell dead in the surprise round. The dwarf won initiative, and the second ogre fell before it could move.

The party stared slightly agape at me as the dwarf calmly went to collect his arrows. Needless to say, the "short" comments stopped short.

Yeah, AB brings a metric ton of adorable Diplomacy, inb4 the PC's ruins her chances to use it.

As for NPC delegation, one of our DnD parties used a beloved NPC (as in one of the PC's love interests) to run interference as a distraction. What we thought she was gonna do was start a fight somewhere away from the spot we were trying to "sneak" into...I say "sneak" because that party has the grace and delicacy of a flaming, flailing hippo, hence the need for the distraction. Instead, said NPC dresses as a crazed homeless lady who thinks herself the prophet of the one true savior, the Muffin Man. She's so successful at this distraction, all the guards chase her down several dark alleys, probably because she insulted every deity know to role-players. By the time we got back dealing with the BBEG, we found that she had killed all the guards who tried to fight her, and converted the ones who surrendered into worshiping a deity that was basically our stand-in for the flying spaghetti monster. This became a running gag for the rest of the campaign, and our lovely thespian never stopping being a bad-ass. Kinda hard for me to top NPC delegations stories from my experience after that. Only one that comes close is Smudge from AoH. :P

Gather 'round, children, and I'll tell you a story of NPC delegation gone wrong - then so right.

So it's a Pathfinder campaign (my first!), and my halfling rogue is being pursued by a gang/cult trying to kill him and collect a bounty on his head. I run back to where my fighter buddy had been checking on the caravan we had been hired to protect. While there, the fighter had also met up with an old friend of his from his military days, so when we inevitably get surrounded by cultists he decides to throw his spare weapon - a spear - to the NPC behind us.

Turns out my friend hadn't been paying close enough attention and had mistaken the name "Charles" for "Ruskin," so instead of passing his spear to Ruskin, the veteran warrior, he passed it to Charles, the completely-useless-in-combat half-elf caravan leader.

Naturally, Chuck the Caravan Leader's first move is to throw the spear over the cultists' heads, spinning wildly as it goes. That's right, he managed to eggbeater a spear. We all look at the fighter's player and kind of go "Really, guy? Really?" at this point.

However, about four or five rounds into the combat the DM starts making some mysterious rolls without announcing anything, then a spear point jabs out through the main cultist's face, killing him instantly. It seems that Ruskin, the NPC who actually knows how to use a spear, had still been hanging around, saw his buddy in trouble, and - what luck! - found a spear just lying there while looking for a way to help.

And that is how Chuck the Caravan Leader became my personal lord and saviour.

And as my luck would have it, I already have a pretty good one for this:

Our first campaign, one of our party members was a neutral good human cleric. Not only was the guy an amazing healer, but he was an unstoppable tank because of how well he could heal.

For example: Once we were fighting a minotaur, a drow, and some third guy I forget. The cleric was going to to toe with the minotaur.

At one point the minotaur managed to slice open the front of his torso, putting him down to very little HP and bleeding uncontrollably. Cleric's next turn, he heals himself to the point where the wound is literally no more than a scratch and his HP is only one point from full.

Needless to say we were all but unstoppable while that guy was on the team.

Exalted campaign set in the Alchemicals campaign world. For those who've never heard of it, basic premise is that a realm estranged from Creation for five thousand years finds a way back and sends their mechanically built Champions with powers there to scout and 'negotiatate' . Hijinks ensue.

Anyway, one major barrier in the first few sessions was the fact that no one spoke the language of Creation. One of our NPCs (technically our boss, but eh) can speak Old Realm, sort of Exalted's answer to Latin. Badly.

We pick a temple to ask at for directions, figuring that the most likely place to find someone else who speaks Old Realm. Forward the translator.

GM - *rolls* Uh...triple botch. The priest starts yelling in his native language and everyone is glaring at you with pure hate.
Player 1 - What did she say?
Player 2 - This is your god. This is the wall against which she spends all her time with sailors.

In my buddy's home-grown game, we have an NPC who's a regular part of the ship's crew (post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting IN SPAAAACE) who's a scientist, and we trust her to run the scanners, check for bombs, or unauthorized passengers, or to see if someone's a replicant, or an android. That sort of thing. Also, she pilots the ship when the captain (PC) is off gambling or reveling in the carnage of personal combat. Or getting drunk. He does that a lot.

Also for a while had an NPC who was a juvenile space apatasaurus who happened to be sapient, and some kind of technomancer who could hack computers with his mind and had racial genetic memory. We trusted him, to an extent... But being a kid, he had a penchant for playing with things and we had to be firm that he couldn't fiddle with the engine control systems, ESPECIALLY while in flight. Eventually managed to find his parents, though, after going off into the vast unexplored sections of the galaxy, but we got a cool jump system out of it that was our "get the F--- out of trouble" card for the longest time.

We've been playing with diplomacy helping with haggling when selling equipment. The only character in the party with a reasonable diplomacy is the NPC princess we accidentally kidnapped back around level 3 and have been training as a ranger. She's also our tracker.

Another time when I was running a game, no one in the party wanted to play a cleric so I NPC'd one as a 'noble canary' to try to make him useless except as a heal monkey. STR 1, etc. Except that his various free feat-like things that he got for being a songbird made him pretty deadly against undead. So when they came across the coal mine full of shadows, and didn't want to waste fourth level spells on more than one death ward...

So they loaded up the canary with everything they could think of -- speed spells, protection spells, a damage aura -- and told him to go take care of the shadows. I was tempted to just say 'you never see him again' but the shadows literally couldn't hurt him and he could kill them in one hit. x.x So having him solo the dungeon for them actually worked.

I want to hear more about this princess. How did the party ACCIDENTALLY kidnap her? Like, they rescued her from a dungeon and she has no idea how to get back to her kingdom? (Heck, then training her as a ranger kind of makes sense -- it all stems from orienteering, so she doesn't get that lost again.)

In the superhero game I'm in, we do it all the time, since one of the main focuses of it is that we're teaching a group of students basically how to be heroes. Most recently the city was being terrorized by enchanted living ice sculptures, so the kid who we brought on to be the team's equivalent of Oracle (he's an expert in magical theory... who can't do more than just really basic magic) saves the day by figuring out how to disenchant them all, then using one of the weaker sculptures as an antennae on his communications array to disable ALL of them.

In our late, lamented Fireborn campaign -- one of the best games I ever ran -- we were playing out an epic combat from the Mythic Age. Fireborn is a game where the PCs are reincarnated dragons-in-human-bodies in modern London, and it has a flashback mechanic in which they play through scenes from long ago as their dragon characters, and everything gets turned up to 11.

In this particular combat, the four dragon PCs were leading an army to go conquer some continent or another, but their target was guarded by floating magical towers that were chewing up the army with heavy artillery every time they got close enough to fight. So the dragons took wing to go bring down one of the towers. The towers themselves had some high-powered mages on them, and were guarded by a squadron of gryphon-riders and shielded with an orbiting ring of floating rocks.

The awesome-NPC part comes in because each of the dragons also let a human mount ride on their backs -- the most elite of the human warriors from their army below. One of the NPCs was Lily (the dragon's recurring love interest, a human who he kept track of through her various incarnations), who had already established herself as a badass earlier in the campaign, by sacrificing herself to distract an enemy ten times her size right before he was able to cast an instant-death spell on one of the PCs. But even Lily, who was making gryphonriders drop like flies with her longbow, got out-badassed by an NPC who we retroactively came to call Leonidas.

Leo botched badly while firing an arrow, see, and snapped his bow. So he shrugged, pulled out his sword, and as his dragon did some dogfighting with gryphonriders near the tower, he *jumped right off the dragon's back* in a suicide leap toward the tower.

One marginal success later, he slammed into the tower's edge. Then the dice I was using for him caught fire.

He soaked a bunch of falling damage with a crazy defense roll, hauled himself onto the towertop, and in a sequence of ridiculous crits, singlehandedly butchered the three mages that were sniping at the PCs while the gryphons kept them distracted. The caster PC then hit the tower with a disintegrate spell, and that was their mission accomplished. But then one of the dragons' brothers showed up -- roaring out a duel challenge to Jaaros, the only PC in range for Leonidas' pickup. That left Leo stranded on the crumbling, falling tower.

So he screamed a battle cry and jumped off the tower in a suicide leap at a gryphonrider.

Yet another critical success later, he slammed to a lucky landing on the erratically moving gryphon's back, and used his surprise attack to Sparta-kick the rider out into space. The gryphon tried to shake him off and bite his face, so he backstabbed the gryphon. One last critical success later, he rode the dead gryphon down to the ground, keeping its wings spread for a makeshift glider.

Then I realized: Because our ground forces were still hanging back out of artillery range, Leonidas landed, alone, in front of the entire enemy army.

Because there was no possible other way he could have acted at that point, I narrated him screaming a challenge at the *entire army*, brandishing his swords from atop the dead gryphon and rolling intimidate.

Unbeknownst to him, behind his back, Jaaros and his brother were hurtling toward the ground, locked in a battle to the death. And the other PCs weren't about to let this epic pass by.

As Leonidas screamed his challenge, the earth shook with the impact of two dragons hitting at terminal velocity. Then the rubble of the demolished tower's rock ring slammed to earth in a huge circle around him. Then the remaining three PCs touched down and glared silently over his shoulder.

I think if I were DMing that I would've retroactively declared the campaign to actually be following the story of the greatest NPC who ever lived. Like holy crap, that's the greatest thing I've ever heard.

This is a bit complex... The players found a prisoner back down at level 2. He was a guy in a FULL suit of armor- even little mesh grilles over the eyeholes so arrows couldn't get in. You couldn't see any part of his actual body. Well they rescued him, but he didn't know who he was- only that he remembered being a knight, and he knew how to fight. Eventually they pieced together that he wasn't quite... right. Dubbing him Aramis, they took him around and eventually noticed that he didn't eat, sleep, and that his armor was actually welded shut. He also didn't seem to be harmed by non-magical weapons. Well, being the intrepid sidequesters that they are, this group decided to find out everything about this guy. It took a long time, but they finally found out that he was a great leader of knights 30 years ago in a different kingdom. To avoid having his soul stolen, his good friend ... well... stole his soul. He was doing arcane immortality experiments, he wanted his friend to live... Didn't get it QUITE right, unfortunately. Anyway, they found his remains and slapped a Ressurection on him (A lowly NPC! I was so happy they'd gotten attached) And here comes the delegation part... Soon after, their hub city was attacked by an army of ogres. Remembering that I had said... must have been months earlier, at this point... that he was a tactical genius, they decided to put HIM in charge of the defense of the city, rather than do it themselves and risk screwing up. I said good job, and for all their hard work and dedication to this NPC, allowed him to count as 4 victory points in their favor. The battle was won.

Of course you should leave diplomacy to young adorable children. Nobody can resist that.

Like the time the Five Fathers Adventuring Party had to talk to the king of a neighbouring country and took Sarah along with them because she somehow got involved in the quest. Aka Sarah had a playdate with the king's daughter (they were that famous by that point)

Now the problem at hand was that the king was a good hearted doofus whose kingdom more or less got ruled by his chancellor who had promised an archdemon the soul of the princess in return for power. One major hazard was that they just couldn't outright attack the chancellor and risk a war between countries so they had to take a more cautious route: diplomacy. DUN DUN DUUUUUN!

While the party was locked in talks with the king, Sarah met up with the princess. But as most of you know, having your soul be sold to an archdemon does terrible things to your complexion. So much so that Sarah decided to step in herself in the ongoing diplomacy talks with the king, seeing as the party was getting nowhere due to bad rolls, bad decisions and the fact that diplomacy doesn't equate fireball or sword to the face. As the party was running out of options, they saw no point in not letting her try so they quickly convinced the king that Sarah was a child embassador here to settle things and let her talk.

'Hello my king.
Look at your daughter. Now back to me. Now back at your daughter. Now back to me. Sadly, she isn't me. But if your chancellor stopped selling her soul to an evil archdemon and surrendered to us, she could smile like she's me. Look down. Back up. Where are you? You're in a throne room with the girl your girl could smile like. What's in your hand? Back at me. I have it. It's a spell scroll with incriminating evidence against that chancellor you have. Look again. The evidence is now a truth spell. Anything is possible when your daughter isn't getting her soul sold to evil and enjoys her life. I'm on a playdate.'

It was after said adventure that Sarah, whenever she was with the group, got delegated to diplomacy talks whenever it called for. :)

Last campaign was all about delegating crucial combats to NPCs. It was us, the regular guys, watching demigods kill each other. The campaign ended when our resident wizard went mad out of righteous frustration and executed a series of elemental spells that should, in that particular setting, brought about the apocalypse. The DM was ready for that scenario however, and effectively nullified everything. It was a sad, sad afternoon.

Ah, we also delegated a diplomatic situation once, but that was intended by us. The NPC clearly had some advantages, so why bother keeping her away...

I had a NPC with us who was a wizard. in a campain called "War of the burning sky".. her name of Katrina. she was a 5th level wizard who's favorite spell was fireball... ON EVERYTHING! Demon in a hotel room. Fireball. squid? Fireball. Monk trying to kill us and i'm at 10 Hp?fireball. FIREBALL FIREBALL FIREBALL!

In one campaign I was in years ago, the party was invited to visit this island of the dead and damned ruled by a horrible Lich King who was very skilled at pretending to be nice.

You know, sending armies of skeletons to protect an "ally" from attack while their own army was off somewhere else.

All the dead just swelled his own army. So, we get there, and my dwarven cleric of.. Pelor I think... was rightly skeptical. He was built for and enjoyed slaying undead while healing entire armies.

We had an NPC diplomat with us because the DM didn't trust any of us either in or out of character not to screw up these talks because he didn't want to deal with us fighting our way back to the boat.

The first line out of his mouth as we sat down to dinner was, "Lord Exdeath (not really), I would like to call your attention to my colleague, the dwarf seated across from me. He is a very wise cleric and quite calm. However, I must warn you that if you betray us in any manner, such as by poisoning this wonderful feast you have layed out before us, or having someone come along and stab us in our backs, he will explode with enough holy energy to wipe this entire little island off the map."

I guess he noticed my character casting Death Throes before they arrived, and refreshing the duration every time it ran out.

There was this one time I was playing a Warforged Wizard in Eberron, when a Celestial Red Dragon from another plane had taken residence in the storage room on our air ship. The DM described it as a 'storage room of holding' and it was interdimensional, pretty much. So, this dragon worshipped elementals as Gods, apparently, which wasn't good for us, because our airship was one of three that was using a split monolithe elemental as ring. I chiefly explained to the dragon in the most logical manner I could that we were not responsible for the harm caused to the elemental and that wewere in fact trying to find the other airships. The party was trying to stop a weapons smuggling ring, which I explained, but suggested we would be willing to rejoin the 'god'. Who would've figured the truth could be used to get a dragon to join the party?

- A pair of NPCs, Shipwreck and Lifeguard. Shipwreck was a pony inventor/sailor in love with a seapony, so we helped him (and he us) finish a submarine to go to the seapony kingdom. Lifeguard was his alcoholic brother, who came with us. While there, we got assaulted by zombie sharks. When we return to the sub, we find Lifeguard surrounded by zombie shark corpses.

- Platinum Coronet, a rich, crazy pegasus set to be in an arranged marriage with our PC doctor (much to his lament). We had to evade her in a train (by distracting her with ring shopping) and later, in a submarine, when she piloted a ocean cruiser to intercept our sub launch. Then later again, we met her at a underground auction, where we convinced her to bid and win the ponysutra for the doctor PC.

I have a sneaking suspicion the DM for the "Shipwreck and Lifeguard" bit may have watched G1 GI Joe as a kid. Though "Lifeguard" sounds closer to Joe!Shipwreck's personality (don't remember enough about Joe!"Lifeline"'s personality to comment on whether it was a swap or not).

Well, the main NPCs of note in our Zilean's Revenge campaign are Lizzie and her cubs. Lizzie is a dire liger who was the mount of a paladin. After the paladin's death, Lizzie and her cubs were kept on hand at the temple to guard part of the paladin's remains (which were responsible for maintaining the holy wards). This is an old, war-veteran mother who has kids to protect and is as big as horse at least.

Our group has found that the lich that the paladin fought before has returned. We are infiltrating the temple blind to try and subdue the cultists that ran inside and disarm the bombs they've placed.

And then our ranger breaks the lock on a massive door and finds Lizzie on the other side.

Actions of note:
1. Horizon tries to Intimidate Lizzie and fails. Lizzie tries to Intimidate Horizon...and rolls a nat 20.
2. Lizzie inadvertently kills a cultist by throwing a suit of armor out of a window, which lands on an escaping cultist's head.
3. One of the cubs assists in subduing a cultist, while another cub kills a cultist by pouncing on him, sending him headfirst off of a balcony.
4. A cultist decides to escape our attacks by entering Lizzie's room. My character looked inside afterwards, and failed a roll that would have kept him from throwing up at the sight.
5. Lizzie does a "death from above" on a giant bone snake thing that had formed in the middle of the temple, and finished it off by flinging its head through the doors leading outside. Past the holy wards which disintegrated it.

She can probably _still_ out-gun the rest of the party with a bit of preparation time. Her elemental summons can lay waste to substantial chunks of armies (even with enemy casters active), and turning into a dragon and using a combination of fear-aura and "I shred you now" tends to work for the rest.

This would be the same woman who went toe to toe with the Darth Vader expy in a sword fight and killed him by critting twice in a row.

"Valued ally" doesn't even begin to cover it.

(My character finally proposed, and she said "yes". My character is attracted to people who can out-badass him at his own game.)

On our quest to track down kidnappers that were targeting females with some sort of magic talent, we used an NPC street walker as bait because our Oracle was such a pain about being kidnapped. We created a minor magic item that made her (the street walker) smell like roses, and another item that caused things around her to move about. Once we spread the word around that she was magic, we followed her around, trying to make sure that she was going to be kidnapped.

Well, she wasn't. She got shanked on a street corner by some thugs hired by her pimp because he thought that she was holding out on him about being magical. That was the last time that group outsourced our traps.

I have a rather...complicated story of NPC delegation.
My group had just started a campaign not long ago. We were in hot pursuit of the Big Bad who was seeking to do something with a dark god which involved an orgy of human sacrifice (for various reasons, we enver found out what he was trying to do).
My character was a True Nuetral Barbarian, who's entire outlook was, "I look out for my own. Everything else is not my problem." However, he was also the primary motivation behind catching the big bad NOW. I was the only tank, so the group stuck with me, despite not knowing WHY I was so dead set on taking down the big bad so fast.
We wound up taking a shortcut through a mountain cave, but encountered an incredibly high level dragon. Given relative levels, the DM made an out of character comment that a critical success on our part would probably just barely nick the dragons scales. (When the DM had set up this campaign, he'd expected us to have done a few level up sidequests before getting here or to take the long way around.)
The rest of the group prepared to run (the DM gave us that chance, since the dragon gave no indication of moving. It was the "block the path" type of boss.) I drew my sword and told the dragon, "Move or die."
My group stared at me in shock. The DM stared at me in shock. In campaign, the dragon stared at me in shock. After several minutes, the dragon found her voice and said, "Why?"
I told her she was between me and the villain I was pursuing. She asked me why it was so important I catch him, and why I had to go this way.
"He has my baby girl."
At this point, the rest of the group was stunned. It was my characters primary motivation throughout that entire campaign, but I'd kept it for a dramatic reveal.
The DM rolled to see how the dragon responded. It turned out, the dragon was a nesting mother, and seeing how dedicated I was to saving my daughter, she cast high level enchantments to protect and hide her egg, and then joined me in my quest to rescue my daughter.
We then delegated all future diplomacy matters to the dragon.

Recently, I've been running one of the most famous dungeons of all time for my Pathfinder group. Because of the way a previous campaign had ended, and because I like bringing back old characters, my original paladin/gun tank is now an epic level bartender. Going by CR, he's about a CR 40, which also happens to be his level. The *SPOILERS FOR THOSE OF YOU THAT HAVEN'T PLAYED RAPPAN ATHUK ALL THE WAY DOWN TO LEVEL 15!!!!!!!!*, so if they ever get that far, they should go get him and delegate him to taking out *LOL NO NAMES FOR YOU* while they focus on taking out the minions.

As for the spoilers, this IS Rappan Athuk, the Dungeon of Graves. You know? "Don't go down the well." And all that?

What was really funny, though, is that the tanking was mostly left to an earth elemental the party wizard (Also the longest one that survived) summoned up. He got that hunk of rock some armor and a good weapon. Too bad he didn't do so well...